Sitka & Spruce Review: Getting the right size and price
You ever do this thing where you enjoy a meal, think it’s OK on the price, then later on when you think back, you realize they gave you an order of something in the larger size (more expensive). This probably doesn’t happen to someone who’s not a cheap Chink. In fact, I was happy with the meal at Sitka and Spruce in Seattle. The one thought I had which was incorrect was that they gave you a lot of food. What actually happened was I thought I ordered the appetizer portion and they gave the entree portion, and that’s the real reason it felt like a lot of food. See I was going to rave about this place in Seattle that just won a James Beard Award for Best Chef Northwest. I can’t even say it was shady, because I should have asked. But really that server should clarified with me what I wanted. His decision to either not ask or to forget to ask was simply a measure of his skill to treat well those customers who are cheap. While I do not want to dwell on the failures of a single server, I will.
The bread. Sure the bread was good and the butter too, but bread comes in two sizes at Sitka and Spruce. The $3.5 size and the $6 dollar size. We didn’t actually order bread at the beginning. We went with the idea to order one appetizer and one entree per person. The server let us know that was a lot of food. I was like, “Oh how nice of this deceptive asshole.” (Note the extra expletives I’m adding after the fact). One of the things we ordered was a chickpea puree and he said it’d go well with bread. It actually was a good dish, the chickpea puree, but it did not in fact, go well with bread. So we said OK for the bread. But that’s the gotcha! A server with well-rounded skills and intention would have specified with us which size we wanted. He did not do this. He failed. Fuck him. That’s right, I’m calling out a dude for $2.5 on this dish and $8 on the next fuck up.
Chickpea puree, fucking asshole, long cooked greens, pinenuts, and chili fucking oil for either $9 or $17. Again. I think it’s pretty normal for a server to do his fucking job correctly and ask people when they order multiple things whether they want a dish as an appetizer. See, this post coulda gone completely the other way if I just talked about how I felt about the food. But since this is my blog, I ain’t gotta do that shit. I’m going to talk about how the $8 difference changes how all this is written. I mean, all press is good press right? Now I can’t say if this is normal procedure at Sitka and Spruce, but I’m just telling you how I got it. Bad experience yo.
I am petty. It doesn’t really matter. It comes down to this. If the server did his job correctly, yes he’d be out of $8 dollars on that tab. The problem is, $8 matters more to a diner than it does to a restaurant. Maybe that helped the restaurant make an extra $2 after expenses and helped the server with an extra $1 on the tip. But in the end, what you get is this nice blog article shitting on you for the rest of the life of this domain name being active (which is going to be a pretty long ass time, let me reassure you). Was my experience at Sitka & Spruce bad or poor? I can’t really tell you. I can tell you that when I looked at the menu prices as I decided to write about this place, I became resentful at the inability of a server at an award winning restaurant to do his job properly. Now I can’t speak to whether or not he has inadequate training, or if it’s just a slip of the mind. I really don’t give a fuck. The end result to me is the same.
Sitka & Spruce1531 Melrose Ave E.Seattle, WA 98122206-324-0662
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